Tag Archives: microsoft

gaming, mobile, smartphones, video

Microsoft announces Internet Explorer for Xbox 360, makes bid for living room

At the E3 conference in Las Vegas Microsoft has made a series of announcements focused on its Xbox 360 games console, but also relating to Windows Phone, Windows 8, and even Apple iOS and Google Android.

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Xbox SmartGlass is a free app for Windows Phone, Windows 8, iOS and Android which links communicates with the Xbox. Examples include:

  • Watching a movie on a tablet while travelling, getting half way through, and automatically resuming on the Xbox at home.
  • Seeing related content on your tablet such as team members, maps, game inventory, and so on, while the TV or game action takes place on the main Xbox screen.
  • Using the tablet to navigate web pages that are also displayed in Internet Explorer on the Xbox, tapping links and using pinch and zoom.

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Yes, IE is now promised for the Xbox “this fall”, and there will be a new web hub. No word yet about Adobe Flash, but with a strong focus on multimedia in this context, it would certainly make sense to include it, as Microsoft has done for Metro-style IE in Windows 8. In fact, the browser shown at E3 on Xbox looked reminiscent of the Windows 8 Metro version.

Other major consoles also have web browsers, so what is special about Microsoft’s late inclusion of the same feature? The company says that web browsers on other consoles are little used because they are hard to navigate, and is counting on a combination of Kinect voice control and SmartGlass to make it work better on Xbox.

Another problem though is that most web sites are simply not designed for viewing from twelve feet back. A second awkward question: if you have your tablet out, why not just use the tablet’s own web browser?

It makes little sense for general web browsing, but can work for playing videos or viewing images, which I guess is the main idea here.

Microsoft has also announced Xbox Music, which sounds like a replacement for Zune and its subscriptions. You will be able to download and/or subscribe to 30 million tracks, and the service will work seamlessly, according to Microsoft, on Windows Phone, Xbox and Windows 8.

Watching the E3 press event was an odd experience. Xbox games are still dominated by macho fighting titles like Halo, Splinter Cell, and Black Ops, all of which were demonstrated complete with bone-crunching violence, death and mayhem. At the same time, Microsoft is trying to make the console the entertainment hub for the whole family, and for movies and sport as much as for games, so we also got Dance Central 3, and exercising with Nike plus Kinect.

One thing not mentioned was Xbox vNext. The 360 was released in November 2005, an eternity ago in technology terms. The hardware has held up well, but even so, if Apple pulls out something TV-related soon (perhaps even at its WWDC event next week) then it will have the advantage of being able to release something based on up to date hardware.

microsoft, windows

Windows Vista designer pops up to explain and defend Windows 8

4 Comments

I wrote a first look for Windows 8 Release Preview for The Register which prompted, as you would expect, a barrage of comments from Reg users, most expressing distaste for Redmond’s latest. Buried on page three of the comments though is this one which is worth calling out, since it explains some of the thinking behind Aero Glass in Windows Vista and how that same thinking is expressed in the Metro design – though note that the user mdc (who is that?) says in a later comment that he has “moved into a different field entirely (photography)” so is not responsible for Metro or Windows 8.

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Anyway, mdc observes that Microsoft has been working for years on the idea of a “content-centric” user interface, one where the surrounding chrome disappears so that content is king. In this respect, Glass can be seen as a move towards the Metro immersive UI:

The initial premise for Glass (as it was called back then, the Aero UX sprung up around the Glass model) was not – as most people believe – to provide eye candy for the end user. Instead, it was an attempt to pull the window chrome away from the content and make it as unobtrusive as possible. The whole point of the glass effect itself was to allow the end user to make better use of their screen real-estate by allowing them to see content beneath the active window.

Glass was not radical though, and did not change the model of multiple overlapping windows. According to mdc though, something more revolutionary was considered for Vista:

Some of my other concepts promoted a VERY different approach to the user experience, much more in line with what is seen today in Windows 8. In fact, the premise for the shift in the desktop paradigm goes back as far as the early Blackcomb concepts first demoed by the MSN services division in 1999; it has ALWAYS been felt that the desktop itself is a rather clunky way of providing content to the end user, which is – after all – the purpose of computing devices, be they traditional desktops, laptops, phones, or even set-top boxes. Windowing systems were designed to allow users to work on multiple pieces of data in quick succession, and yet over the years usability studies have found that users rarely manipulate more than 2 documents simultaneously.

In the end the idea was rejected, partly because of the work involved, and partly because Microsoft’s Jim Allchin, among others, felt that the familiarity of the Windows user interface was an important selling point versus the competition.

Apparently we  are wrong to imagine that Windows 8 is based on the Windows Phone design:

While some have suggested that Windows 8’s interface is "touch-only" or "based on Windows Phone 7", that couldn’t be further from the truth. Windows Phone 7 was instead a pilot program – in a relatively low risk sector – for the designs originally suggested for Blackcomb, which have now found their way into Windows 8. At the time, touch interfaces hadn’t even been conceived of – remember, back then touch sensitive screens were Resistive nasties that required at best a stylus, or at worst jabbing at them hard with a finger or pen.

The fact is that Metro just happened to be easily accessible for touch devices, and that has been touted as one of its benefits; it is NOT, and never has been, the original aim of the design. The aim of the design is exactly the same as Aero was – to take the chrome away from the content, and allow the user to focus on what they’re doing rather than unnecessary clutter. A perfect example of this is internet Explorer on Metro; in its default state, all you see is a webpage; chrome CAN be pulled up if the user requires, but is otherwise absent. The majority of Metro applications are like this – in fact it’s part of the Metro UX specifications.

and he adds:

Personally, I see Metro as a good thing; it allows me to do my work without distraction, and I’m just disappointed that I wasn’t the one who did the design work for it this time around.

Windows 8 Metro is not just about touch then: it is a reshaping of the user interface to put content first.

mobile, tablets

Getting started with Windows 8: Four things new users need to know

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Today I upgraded a laptop from Windows 7 to Windows 8 Release Preview and watched the owner’s first steps with the new operating system – a bit like the Chris (or Joe) Pirillo experiment, except this was an in-place upgrade so a somewhat familiar environment.

Nevertheless, the user struggled to get going. Microsoft could (and I hope will) make this easier by spelling out the use of four simple features which are needed in order to navigate and control Windows 8 successfully.

Note: this is for users with keyboard and mouse. If you have a touch screen or even a new laptop with a trackpad designed for Windows 8, it is easier.

1. How to open the Start menu. There are several ways:

a) Move the mouse down to the bottom left corner or just beyond. A Start button appears.

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b) Move the mouse down to the bottom right corner or just beyond (tablet users swipe from the right edge). The Charms bar appears and you can click Start.

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c) Press the Windows key, or Ctrl-Esc if you do not have one. Seems obvious; but my victim did not think to do so. It appears that the Windows key is not that popular with users.

2. How do you close or exit a Metro-style app? Easy – see above – bring up the Start menu. This is not obvious though. My user instinctively pressed Esc, which did not work.

3. How do you control a Metro-style app? There are two key things to learn:

a) Right-click the mouse (swipe up on a tablet) to summon app menus and controls. For example, in the Music app this gets you play controls.

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b) Mouse to bottom right corner or just beyond and click Settings. In Windows 8 the Settings on the Charms bar are dynamic. App settings appear here. For example, in the Music app you can get at your account settings and other preferences, or even change the volume.

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4) How do you switch between apps? Answer: Alt-tab is your friend. This is the most reliable way to see all running desktop and Metro-style apps and switch between them.

Another thing to try is to move the mouse to the top left corner or just beyond until a thumbnail appears, then drag down. Touch users swipe from the left and immediately back out. This shows thumbnails of running Metro-style apps, plus one for the desktop. Right-click a thumbnail for options including Close.

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There are a couple of problems with this feature. First, the gesture or mouse movement is not obvious. Second, it does not show all running apps, since the desktop shows as a single thumbnail.

The big question: how will Microsoft get users past the initial hump of not finding the Start menu or other essentials? I have seen even highly technical users slip up. for example someone who thought Metro-style Mail was broken because it opened as a mainly blank screen with the word Mail and no obvious way to get it working. The solution is Charms and then Settings, but this kind of problem is frustrating.

A human guide is ideal, but failing that what can Microsoft do? Users often ignore introductory tutorials, so I would suggest on-screen help like pointing arrows for those critical first minutes.

The deeper question: are these problems a sign of something wrong in the Windows 8 design, or is it to be expected when radical changes are made to a familiar system? My instinct is that Microsoft could have done more to make it discoverable, but I do not see it as a showstopper. Users will learn.

microsoft, windows

Huge icons in Windows 8 Metro

1 Comment

This is the SkyDrive Metro-style app running on my 1280 x 1024 desktop, in its default view. Note that each icon is 185 x 211 px. The actual title of each document is in relatively small text though still readable.

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On my slate I only get two rows per screen:

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You can set it to Detail view which gives nine rows on the desktop display and six rows on the slate.

Touch-friendly, undoubtedly, but is this really best-practice design? What if you have lots of documents in a folder? I suppose it is just swipe-swipe-swipe, not helped by the fact that the SkyDrive app cannot be searched:

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nor is there any way that I can see to sort the documents, say by last modified.

Of course you can do all these things in the touch-hostile desktop application.

Both the app and Windows 8 itself are pre-release so may improve, but I would like to see a smarter approach to browsing and selecting documents in Windows 8 Metro-style.

For more on Windows 8, see my review on The Register.

.net, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

New Windows 8, new Visual Studio 2012

Microsoft has released the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2012 (now the official name), which you can download here, to coincide with the release of Windows 8 Release Preview and Windows Server 2012 Release Preview.

Visual Studio also has a new logo, as you can see from the setup window below.

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Microsoft’s Jason Zander has posted about the new release here. Some of the main areas of difference between the RC and the Beta are:

  • Better performance
  • User interface tweaks including the return of a little more colour to the product
  • Solution Explorer filtering
  • New Metro style app templates
  • Improved XAML and Blend designers
  • Updated ASP.NET 4.5 web forms to support the await keyword
  • Tweaks to LightSwitch, Team Foundation Server, Architectural Tools

There is also a more detailed post by Scott Hanselman on what’s new in web development here.

microsoft, windows

Windows 8 Release Preview now available, Adobe Flash included, finished version expected August 2012

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Microsoft has made the Release Preview of Windows 8 available to download. So what’s new?

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The press release:

  • Confirms that a “touch-friendly and power-optimized Adobe Flash Player” is integrated into Internet Explorer 10
  • Announces new Family Safety features
  • States that IE10 is “Do not track” by default
  • Announces new apps and improvements to existing ones

All of which will come as a disappointment to those hoping for any sort of change of direction following a mixed-to-negative reception for the Consumer Preview.

Windows chief Steven Sinofsky says:

If the feedback and telemetry on Windows 8 and Windows RT match our expectations, then we will enter the final phases of the RTM process in about 2 months.

My guess that feedback along the lines of “Bring back the Start menu” will not count as an obstacle.

microsoft, software development, windows 7

The application that would not uninstall

4 Comments

I install a ton of pre-release and test software so it is not surprising that I sometimes run into Windows Installer issues. Here is an entertaining error though. It is unlikely, I guess, that you will hit this problem; but I present it as an illustration of what can go wrong, as we move into the era of locked-down operating systems and easy app installs. Though even these are not perfect. Notice how the operating system fights me all the way.

Years ago I installed Microsoft’s Office Labs Ribbon Hero, a tutorial add-on for Office. At the time I was running Windows Vista. Since then I have done an in-place upgrade to Windows 7. I tried to remove it today through Control Panel and got this message:

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After presenting this information setup closed and the application was not uninstalled.

So … the application does not support Windows 7 and therefore you cannot remove it. Clever, and I found this a tricky problem to get around.

I took a look at the Windows installer files which you can find in %SYSTEMROOT%\Installer. All the msi files have random names. However, you can right-click the column heading area and choose More, then check Subject in the list. Click OK, and now the application to which each msi relates appears.

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Now you can click the column heading to sort by subject and find the problem msi.

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I copied the msi to my desktop.

For the next step you need the Orca tool from the Windows Installer SDK. If Orca is installed, you can right-click the MSI and choose Edit with Orca.

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I then selected LaunchCondition and deleted the launch condition that required Windows XP.

INSTALLED OR VersionNT = 501 OR APPLYING_AUTOUPDATE

Hmm, something odd here as it should pass INSTALLED? Still, save, right-click the msi, choose Uninstall. You still hit the error. Why? Somehow, Windows works out that you are uninstalling a product for which an msi exists in the official location and uses that one instead. You have to copy your modified msi to the correct location. Open an administrator command prompt:

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Now right-click the msi and choose Uninstall.

It worked. Phew.

microsoft

Making sense of Microsoft’s Windows 8 strategy

18 Comments

Here are two things we learn from Jensen Harris’s post of 18 May.

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First, Microsoft cares more about WinRT and Metro, the new tablet-oriented user interface in Windows 8, than about the desktop. In the section entitled Goals of the Windows 8 user experience, Harris refers almost exclusively to WinRT apps. Further, he asks the question: what is the role of desktop in Windows 8?

It is pretty straightforward. The desktop is there to run the millions of existing, powerful, familiar Windows programs that are designed for mouse and keyboard. Office. Visual Studio. Adobe Photoshop. AutoCAD. Lightroom. This software is widely-used, feature-rich, and powers the bulk of the work people do on the PC today.

Does that mean the desktop is for legacy, like XP Mode in Windows 7? Harris denies it:

We do not view the desktop as a mode, legacy or otherwise—it is simply a paradigm for working that suits some people and specific apps.

He adds though that “We think in a short time everyone will mix and match” desktop and Metro apps – though he does not call them Metro apps, he calls them “new Windows 8 apps.”

Second, Microsoft considers that the poor reaction to the Consumer Preview can be fixed by tweaking the detail rather than by changing the substance of how Windows 8 is designed.

But fundamentally, we believe in people and their ability to adapt and move forward. Throughout the history of computing, people have again and again adapted to new paradigms and interaction methods—even just when switching between different websites and apps and phones. We will help people get off on the right foot, and we have confidence that people will quickly find the new paradigms to be second-nature.

In fact, this post is peppered with references to negative reactions for previous versions of Windows. Microsoft is presuming that this is normal and that history will repeat:

Although some people had critical reactions and demanded changes to the user interface, Windows 7 quickly became the most-used OS in the world.

This is revisionist, as I am sure Harris and his team are aware. The reaction to Windows 7 was mainly positive, from the earliest preview on. It was better than Windows Vista; it was better than Windows XP.

Windows Vista on the other hand had a troubled launch and was widely disliked. User Account Control and its constant approval prompts was part of the problem, but more serious was that OEMs released Vista machines with underpowered hardware further slowed down by foistware and in many cases it Vista worked badly out of the box. You could get Vista working nicely with sufficient effort, but many just stayed with Windows XP.

The failure of Vista was damaging to Microsoft, but mitigated in that most users simply skipped a version and waited for Windows 7. The situation now is more serious for Microsoft, both because of the continuing popularity of the Mac and the rise of tablets, especially Apple’s iPad.

It is precisely because of that threat that Microsoft is making such a big bet on Metro and WinRT. The reasoning is that while shipping a build of Windows that improves on 7 would please the Microsoft platform community, it would be ineffective in countering the iPad. It would also fail to address problems inherent in Windows: lack of isolation between applications, and between applications and the operating system; the complexity of application installs and the difficulty of troubleshooting them when they go wrong; and the unsuitability of Windows for touch control.

There is also a hint in this most recent post that classic Windows uses too much power:

Once we understood how important great battery life was, certain aspects of the new experience became clear. For instance, it became obvious early on in the planning process that to truly reimagine the Windows experience we would need to reimagine apps as well. Thus, WinRT and a new kind of app were born.

Another key point: Microsoft’s partnership with hardware manufacturers has become a problem, since they damage the user experience with trialware and low quality utilities. The Metro-style side of Windows 8 fixes that by offering a locked-down environment. This will be most fully realised in Windows RT, Windows on ARM, which only allows WinRT apps to be installed.

Microsoft decided that only a new generation of Windows, a “reimagining”, would be able to compete in the era of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

One thing is for sure: the Windows team under Steven Sinofsky does not lack courage. They have form too. Many of the key players worked on the Office 2007 Ribbon UI, which was also controversial at the time, since it removed the familiar drop-down menus that had been in every previous version of Office. They stuck by their decision, and refused to add an option to restore the menus, thereby forcing users to use the ribbon even if they disliked it. That strategy was mostly successful. Users got used to the ribbon, and there was no mass refusal to upgrade from Office 2003, nor a substantial migration to OpenOffice which still has drop-down menus.

I have an open mind about Windows 8. I see the reasoning behind it, and agree that it works better on a real tablet than on a traditional PC or laptop, or worst of all, a virtual machine. Harris says:

The full picture of the Windows 8 experience will only emerge when new hardware from our partners becomes available, and when the Store opens up for all developers to start submitting their new apps.

Agreed; but it also seems that Windows 8 will ship with a number of annoyances which at the moment Microsoft looks unlikely to fix. These are mainly in the integration, or lack of it, between the Metro-style UI and the desktop. I can live without the Start menu, but will miss the taskbar with its guide to running applications and its preview thumbnails; these remain in the desktop but do not include Metro apps. Having only full-screen apps can be irritation, and I wonder if the commitment to the single-app “immersive UI” has been taken too far. When working in Windows 8 I miss the little clock that sits in the notification area; you have to swipe to see the equivalent and the fast and fluid UI is making me work harder than before.

I believe Microsoft will listen to complaints like these, but probably not until Windows 9. I also believe that by the time Windows 9 comes around the computing landscape will look very different; and the reception won by Windows 8 will be a significant factor in how it is shaped.

microsoft, professional, software development

Microsoft appeals to Windows 8 Metro developers not to stray from the official API

6 Comments

Microsoft’s John Hazen has posted on the official Building Windows 8 blog about the security and reliability principles in the Metro platform in Windows 8. Hazen explains how apps are installed from the Windows store, use contracts to interact with the operating system, and have to ask user consent for access to device capabilities such as the webcam or GPS, or to access user data such as documents and music.

The most intriguing part of the document comes when Hazen appeals to developers to stick to the API that is referenced in the official Windows 8 Metro SDK:

Resist the temptation to find ways to invoke APIs that are not included in the SDK. This ultimately undermines the expectations that customers have for your app. APIs that are outside the SDK are not guaranteed to work with Metro style apps either in this release or in future releases, so you may find that your app doesn’t function properly for all customers. These APIs may also not function properly in the async environment that is foundational to Metro style app design. Finally these APIs may undermine customer confidence by accessing resources or data that Metro style apps would not normally interact with. For all these reasons, we have provided checks in the Windows App Certification Kit to help you catch places where you might have inadvertently called interfaces not exposed by the SDK.

While it is possible to hide or obfuscate calls to APIs that are not included in the SDK, this is still a violation of customer expectations and Store policy. In the end, we have created this platform to help developers like you to build amazing apps that work well with the system and with other apps and devices to delight customers. Working with the Metro style SDK is fundamental to your realizing that goal.

The worrying aspect of this appeal to developers to play nice is Hazen’s admission that crafty developers may find ways to escape the Metro sandbox, undermining both the security and the privacy protection built into Metro. The main protection against this is such such an app should be blocked from the Windows Store, but can Microsoft check with 100% confidence that no hidden or obfuscated API calls exist? How effective is the Metro sandbox?

My guess is that the danger will be greater on the x86 version of Windows 8 than in Windows RT, which is locked down to prevent any third-party desktop applications from being installed. Nevertheless, a large part of the non-Metro Windows API must exist in Windows RT, to support the desktop, Explorer and Microsoft Office.

apple, asus, cloud computing, gaming, mobile

NVIDIA’s GPU in the cloud: will you still want an Xbox or PlayStation?

2 Comments

NVIDIA’s GPU Technology conference is an unusual event, in part a get-together for academic researchers using HPC, in part a marketing pitch for the company. The focus of the event is on GPU computing, in other words using the GPU for purposes other than driving a display, such as processing simulations to model climate change or fluid dynamics, or to process huge amounts of data in order to calculate where best to drill for oil. However NVIDIA also uses the event to announce its latest GPU innovations, and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang used this morning’s keynote to introduce its GPU in the cloud initiative.

This takes two forms, though both are based on a feature of the new “Kepler” wave of NVIDIA GPUs which allows them to render graphics to a stream rather than to a display. It is the world’s first virtualized GPU, he claimed.

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The first target is enterprise VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). The idea is that in the era of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) there is high demand for the ability to run Windows applications on devices of every kind, perhaps especially Apple iPads. This works fine via virtualisation for everyday applications, but what about GPU-intensive applications such as Autocad or Adobe Photoshop? Using a Kepler GPU you can run up to 100 virtual desktop instances with GPU acceleration. NVIDIA calls this the VGX Platform.

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What actually gets sent to the client is mostly H.264 video, which means most current devices have good support, though of course you still need a remote desktop client.

The second target is game streaming. The key problem here – provided you have enough bandwidth – is minimising the lag between when a player moves or clicks Fire, and when the video responds. NVIDIA has developed software called the Geforce GRID which it will supply along with specially adapted Kepler GPUs to cloud companies such as Gaikai. Using the Geforce GRID, lag is reduced, according to NVIDIA, to something close to what you would get from a game console.

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We saw a demo of a new Mech shooter game in which one player is using an Asus Transformer Prime, an Android tablet, and the other an LG television which has a streaming client built in. The game is rendered in the cloud but streamed to the clients with low latency.

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“This is your game console,” said NVIDIA CEO Jen-Sun Huang, holding the Ethernet cable that connected the TV to the internet.

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The concept is attractive for all sorts of reasons. Users can play games without having to download and install, or connect instantly to a game being played by a friend. Game companies are protected from piracy, because the game code runs in the cloud, not on the device.

NVIDIA does not plan to run its own cloud services, but is working with partners, as the following slide illustrates. On the VDI side, Citrix, Microsoft, VMWare and Xen were mentioned as partners.

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If cloud GPU systems take off, will it cannibalise the market for powerful GPUs in client devices, whether PCs, game consoles or tablets? I put this to Huang in the press Q&A after the keynote, and he denied it, saying that people like designers hate to share their PCs. It was an odd and unsatisfactory answer. After all, if Huang is saying that your games console is now an Ethernet cable, he is also saying that there is no need any longer for game consoles which contain powerful NVIDIA GPUs. The same might apply to professional workstations, with the logic that cloud computing always presents: that shared resources have better utilisation and therefore lower cost.